abelard often finds useful phrases
quoted by others, sometimes including them in documents
at this site.
This the first of several pages collecting together these
quotations.
Where relevant, links are given to the document
at abelard.org that includes the quote.

• That passion for equality makes vain the hope
of freedom [1877]
• The danger is not that a particular class is
unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. [1881]

Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274)

"[...] and insofar as it [human law] deviates from right reason it is called unjust law; in such cases it is no law at all but rather a species of violence. Summa theologiae, Ia-Ilae, q. xciii, art. 3, ad 2m.
Ends and means and the individual

“Let him [the abbot] so temper all things that
the strong may have something to strive for and the
weak have nothing to dismay them.”

“IF A BROTHER IS COMMANDED TO DO THE IMPOSSIBLE
If it happens that orders are given to a brother which
are too heavy or impossible, let him receive the order
of his superior with perfect gentleness and obedience.
But if he finds that the weight of the burden is altogether
beyond his strength to fulfil, then let him explain
to his superior the reasons why he cannot do
it, patiently at a suitable time, without showing
any pride or resistance or contradiction. Then, after
his representations, if the superior remains firm in
requiring what he has ordered, let the subject realise
that it is better so, and out of charity, trusting
in the help of God, let him obey.”
[The rule
of Saint Benedict for monasteries]

• We are like dwarfs on the shoulders
of giants, so that we can see more than they,
and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any
sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction,
but because we are carried high and raised up
by their giant size.The Turing
test and intelligence [1]

Clint Black (1962
- )

You can wave your signs in protest
against America taking stands.
The stands America’s taken
are the reason that you can.
[From Iraq
and roll]

When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding
his ownself in his own hands. Like water. And if he
opens his fingers then – he needn’t hope
to find himself again.
—
Margaret: “Father, the man is bad.”
More: “There’s no law against that.”
Roper: “There is a law against it. God’s
law.”
More: “Then God can arrest him.”
Roper: “Sophistication upon sophistication!”
More: “No. Sheer simplicity. The law, Roper, the
law. I know what’s legal, but I don't always know
what’s right. And I'm sticking with what’s
legal.
Roper: “Then you set man’s law against God’s?”
More: “No. Far below. But let me draw your attention
to a fact. I am not God. The currents and eddies of
right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing,
I can't navigate. I'm no voyager. But in the thickets
of the law, there I am a forester. I doubt if there’s
a man alive who could follow me there, thank God.”
Alice: “While you talk, he is gone.”
More: “And go he should, if he was the Devil himself,
until he broke the law.”
Roper: “So now you'd give the Devil the benefit
of law!”
More: “Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road
through the law to get to the Devil?”
Roper: “I'd cut down every law in England to do
that!”
More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and
the Devil turned round on you -- where would you hide,
Roper, the laws all being flat. This country’s
planted thick with laws from coast to coast -- man’s
laws, not God’s -- and if you cut them down --
and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think
you could stand upright in the winds that would blow
then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of the law, for
my own safety’s sake.”

“There’s glory for you!”
“ I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,”
Alice said.
“I meant, ‘there’s a nice knock-down
argument for you!’ ”
“ ‘But‘glory’ doesn’t
mean‘there’s a nice knock-down argument’”,
Alice objected.
“ When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said
in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what
I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether
you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which
is to be master—that’s all.”Through
the Looking-Glass (1872), chapter 6

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

In The laughing prophet:
the seven virtues and G. K. Chesterton [Methuen,
1937], Emile Cammaerts [1878-1953] merged the following
two quotes:

“It’s drowning all your old rationalism
and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and
the name of it is superstition. … It's the first
effect of not believing in God that you lose your common
sense.” [The Oracle of the Dog, 1923,
in The Incredulity of Father Brown] [1]

and

“You all swore you were hard-shelled materialists;
and as a matter of fact you were all balanced on the
very edge of belief - of belief in almost anything.”
[The Miracle of Moon Crescent, 1924, in The Incredulity of Father Brown] [2]

into the paraphrase of the G.K.
Chesterton quotes above:

“The first effect of not believing in God is to
believe in anything.”

Winston Churchill
(1874 - 1965)

The mood and temper of the public in regard to the
treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most
unfailing tests of the civilisation
of any country.
[1910]

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal
vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the
consequence
of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.".
[Speech upon the Right of Election for Lord Mayor of Dublin, 1790]

Thomas Alva Edison (1847
– 1931)

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration’
Said circa 1903, in Harper’s
Monthly Magazine, September 1932 (Source: Oxford
Dictionary of Quotations). However, I think Nesbitt,
a popular Victorian writer on self improvement, pre-dates
this.

Abba Eban, 1970

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed
without
legislation.

Etienne Gilson [1884 - 1978],
Being and Some Philosophers, p. 52

Religion has its own work, which is to educate people
who are too dull to understand philosophy, or too untutored
to be amenable to its teaching. This is why religion
is necessary, for what it preaches is fundamentally
the same as what philosophy teaches, and, unless common
men believed what it preaches, they would behave like
beasts. But theologians should preach, not teach, just
as philosophers should teach, not preach. Theologians
should not attempt to demonstrate, because they cannot
do it, and philosophers must be careful not to get belief
mixed up with what they prove, because then they can
no longer prove anything. Now, to preach creation is
just a handy way to make people feel that God is their
Master, which is true even though, as is well known
by those who truly philosophize, nothing of the sort
ever happened.

Garrett James Hardin (1915
- 2003)

Ecology is the overall science of which economics
is a minor speciality Source:
Hardin obituary on this page. Hardin
website

Heloise

• The name of mistress instead of wife would
be dearer and more honourable for me, only love given
freely, rather than the constriction of the marriage
tie, is of significance to an ideal relationship.

• God is my witness that if Augustus, emperor
of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage
and conferred all the earth upon me to possess for ever,
it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called
not his empress but your whore.Abelard
of Le Pallet, introduction

During the time men live without a common power to
keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which
is called war; and such a war as is of every man against
every man.” Power, ownership
and freedom [8]

• The important thing
for Government is not to do things which individuals
are doing already, and to do them a little better or
a little worse; but to do those things which at present
are not done at all. The
End of Laissez-Faire, 1926, part 4

• Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent
to the historians of Opinion - how a doctrine so illogical
and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring
an influence over the minds of men, and, through them,
the events of history.The
End of Laissez-Faire

• “Lenin was right. There is no subtler,
no surer means of overturning the existing basis of
society than to debauch the currency. The process engages
all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of
destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man
in a million is able to diagnose.”The
Economic Consequences of the Peace, ch. 6.

• Just as the Conservative Party will always have
its diehard wing, so the Labour Party will always be
flanked by the party of catastrophe - Jacobins, Communists,
Bolshevists, whatever you choose to call them. This
is the party which hates or despises existing institutions
and believes that great good will result merely from
overthrowing them - or at least that to overthrow them
is the necessary preliminary to any great good. This
party can only flourish in an atmosphere of social oppression
or as a reaction against the rule of die-hard. In Great
Britain it is, in its extreme form, numerically very
weak. Nevertheless its philosophy in a diluted form
permeated, in my opinion, the whole Labour Party. However
moderate its leaders may be at heart, the Labour Party will
always depend for electoral success on making some slight
appeal to the widespread passions and jealousies which
find their full development in the party of catastrophe.
I believe that this secret sympathy with the policy
of catastrophe is the worm which gnaws at the seaworthiness
of any constructive vessel which the Labour Party may
launch.the passions of malignity, jealousy, hatred of
those who have wealth and power (even in their own body),
ill consort with the ideals to build up a true social
republic. Yet it is necessary for a successful Labour
leader to be, or at least to appear, a little savage.
It is not enough that he should love his fellow-men;
he must hate them too. [1925 p.299-300]

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but
as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing
on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then
finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary,
whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered
before me.

David Oderberg

A state may launch a pre-emptive strike if it has
very good reason for thinking that another state is
preparing for warThe
just war [3]

Thomas Paine

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard
even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this
duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

The great mass of the poor in all countries are become
an hereditary race
[1791, XXVIII.: AGRARIAN JUSTICE. - The Writings of
Thomas Paine, Vol. III (1791-1804)]

Logan Pearson Smith(1865 –
1946)

How it infuriates a bigot when he is forced to drag
out his dark convictions.

Max Planck

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing
its opponents and making them see the light, but rather
because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation
grows up that is familiar with it.
[A Scientific Autobiography, 1949, p. 33
(translated by F. Gaynor) ]

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
[The first words of Scaramouche, a romance of the French Revolution, 1921]

Doutreval of Dijon: Think of the sword like a bird. Clutch it too tightly and you choke it. Too lightly and it flies away.
[From Scaramouche, 1952 MGM film with Stewart Granger, Janet Leigh, Mel Ferrar]

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the
brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but
from their regard to their own interest. We address
ourselves not to their humanity but their self love.
Wealth
of Nations, 1776,
bk. 1, ch. 2

Albert Szent-György

Science consists of seeing what everyone else has
seen but thinking what no one else has thought.

• “What most frequently meets our view
(and occasions complaint), is our teeming population:
our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly
supply us from its natural elements; our wants grow
more and more keen, and our complaints more bitter in
all mouths, whilst Nature fails in affording us her
usual sustenance. In very deed, pestilence, and famine,
and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy
for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance
of the human race [...]”
[writing in De
Anima, chapter XXX]

• “It must be true because it is ridiculous”
/ “It is certain because it is impossible.”
[Certum est quia impossibile est.]

Margaret Thatcher, 3 October
1987

I think we’ve been through a period where too
many people have been given to understand that if they
have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with
it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’
‘I’m homeless, the government must house
me.’ They’re casting their problem on society.
And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There
are individual men and women, and there are families.
And no government can do anything except through people,
and people must look to themselves first. It’s
our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look
after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements
too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s
no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first
met an obligation.